Emily Hobhouse - Second Anglo-Boer War

Second Anglo-Boer War

When the Second Boer War broke out in South Africa in October 1899, a Liberal MP, Leonard Courtney, invited Hobhouse to become secretary of the women's branch of the South African Conciliation Committee, of which he was president.

Hobhouse wrote

It was late in the summer of 1900 that I first learnt of the hundreds of Boer women that became impoverished and were left ragged by our military operations… the poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance.

She set up the Distress Fund for South African Women and Children and sailed for the Cape Colony on 7 December 1900 to supervise its distribution. She wrote later:

I came quite naturally, in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood... it is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself.

When she left England, she only knew about the concentration camp at Port Elizabeth, but on arrival found out about the many other camps (34 in total).

Hobhouse had a letter of introduction to the governor, Alfred Milner, from her aunt, the wife of Arthur Hobhouse, himself the son of Henry Hobhouse, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office under Sir Robert Peel, and who knew Milner. From him she obtained the use of two railway trucks, subject to the army commander, Lord Kitchener's, approval. She received Kitchener's permission two weeks later, although it only allowed her to travel as far as Bloemfontein and take one truck of supplies for the camps, about 12 tons.